Database Managed Content

Unlike traditional Web authoring systems, such as Front Page or Dreamweaver, which create and maintain static HTML pages, CommonSpot manages content in a granular and object-oriented manner. CommonSpot stores and manages all content, except for images and other native document files, within the CommonSpot content repository, a series of relational databases.

This object-oriented framework provides tremendous advantages:

Content stored independently from formatting enables faster, more flexible control over “look and feel” and information updates.

Your organization can apply very fine levels of control over content approval, versioning, scheduling, personalization, and security.

Flexible and secure role assignments enable multiple individuals to contribute to content creation and management in a shared environment with greater efficiency and without risk of overwriting or data loss.

Popular database support maximizes access to existing content repositories: CommonSpot provides support for Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server.

The number of databases needed for your configuration depends on the number of top-level sites. One database exists for:

Each top-level site

Each CommonSpot server

Managing users and groups; certain site configurations may require more than one Users database

In general, there are three different database schemas:

Sites - Manages information for all the sites running on a server, such as the Web document directory, data-source names, etc.

Users - Manages data for individual CommonSpot users, their profiles and passwords, as well as group membership information. A Users database may be associated with one or more sites.

Site-specific content - Houses all site and subsite content. There is one site-specific database for each site.

Related Links

You can download PDF versions of the Content Contributor's, Administrator's, and Elements Reference documents from the support section of paperthin.com (requires login).